Governors of three states — Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia — are sending members of their state National Guards to D.C. to … well, theoretically to combat crime but, if the past week is any indicator, mostly to stand near tourist sites and wear uniforms.

This isn’t because there’s no crime in D.C. to combat (of course there is, as the right-wing media insists one acknowledge) but because the mission as established by President Trump isn’t really about that. Crime is simply the pretext Trump is using to put into effect his long-standing desire to deploy troops on the streets of D.C. Maybe it’s a lingering frustration from what happened in 2020; maybe it’s about pressing his thumb down on a city that voted heavily against him. Either way, it is not centrally about crime.

Because Trump is championing this deployment, his supporters are treating it as necessary and brilliant. And that, in turn, is triggering GOP politicians to start another scramble onto another bandwagon. Hence the deployments from Republican governors in Republican states: They get to say that they helped Trump do the thing that Trump told his base needed to be done. And here we are.

But now the pretext wavers. If there really is an emergency in D.C. that necessitates the use of the National Guard and other federal agencies, that would suggest that crime in D.C. is exceptional. (It would also suggest that crime is rising, which it isn’t; quite the opposite. But if you note that it’s falling, then you find yourself under attack for downplaying the existing crime, even when you aren’t. These are the traps that the pro-Trump bubble uses to keep reality at bay.) Data released by the FBI earlier this month, though, shows that a lot of other places — including places in those three states — had higher rates of violent crime and homicide than did D.C.

I went ahead and made some interactive maps using the FBI data. Cities shown in pink below are ones where the violent crime rate in 2024 was higher than in D.C. Zoom in if you need to.

And here’s the same map but displaying homicide rates. (Technically, murder and non-negligent manslaughter.)

The FBI reported that fully 43 cities in those three states had higher rates of violent crime in 2024 than did D.C. More than 1.2 million people live in those cities, including more than 900,000 in Ohio alone. Yet that state’s National Guard is being deployed to D.C. to protect the capital’s 700,000-odd residents. Half a million Ohioans live in cities with higher homicide rates than D.C. Unfortunately for them, they won’t get to see National Guard troops on their streets — just on their TVs, standing around outside the Lincoln Memorial.

Or maybe the lesson here is that this isn’t really about crime at all.

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Update

August 18. Louisiana and Mississippi have decided to also send troops up to confront the Yankees.

With them, there are now 64 cities that had higher rates of violent crime in 2024 than did D.C. in states whose governors are sending the National Guard to Washington to “combat crime.” Those governors are more worried about the 700,000 residents of D.C., theoretically, than the 1.7 million people in those 64 cities they actually represent.

Photo: D.C. police officer. (National Archives)

Let us now take a break from politics and pivot to the sort of topic that generates Authentic Engagement™ in the Creator Economy: Life hacks.

In this case, we are going to use data from recent YouGov polling to teach you how to prevail at games of chance. Or, at least, to offer insights into the at-times surprising ways in which Americans randomly choose a consistent response from a set of options.

For example, when you toss a coin it is as likely to land as heads as it is tails. But asked which option they would pick for a coin toss, Americans were about three times as likely to say heads.

This seems weird but, presented with the data, it probably shouldn’t. After all, heads is as good a guess as tails, statistically speaking, and it does generally come first when people are presented with the options. So heads is more popular.

This doesn’t really give you an advantage, of course. The outcome of a coin toss is up to the coin, as Anton Chigurh might remind us. Where the YouGov data might help tip the scales a bit more is in how people play Roshambo.

Asked to pick between rock, paper and scissors, almost half of those with an opinion pick rock — making paper the safer first play. Yet paper is also the least common choice in YouGov’s data.

This may again be a function of rock being first in the list. But a possible slight advantage is better than no advantage.

The most striking set of responses came when people were asked what number they would choose between 1 and 10, a large plurality pick 7.

It’s important to note that this was not posed as a situation in which one was trying to get closest to a secret number, in which case 5 would be the clear favorite. That said, my assumption was that 5 would be the choice, in part because I generally do the “pick between 1 and 10” when seeking to resolve disputes between my kids.

Perhaps you, as I was, are curious if there are any differences in these responses by age or (sigh) political party. Well, on the numbers one — no, not really.

There is a more noticeable difference on Roshambo, with Republicans and older Americans more likely than younger people and Democrats to pick rock.

One of the largest differences came in the coin toss, with younger Americans quite a bit more likely to choose tails than older people.

So there you go. When playing rock, paper, scissors, choose paper — particularly against a Republican. If you have to guess a number between 1 and 10, the odds are good that the other person picked 7. And if you are trying to win a coin toss? Uh, good luck, I guess.

Photo: Obama flips a coin at the start of the 2011 Army-Navy game. (National Archives)

The effort by Texas Republicans to wring five more GOP House seats from their state triggered a range of responses. For example: This doesn’t seem like something that a party confident in its electoral chances would do.

Perhaps the most useful responses extrapolated from this attempt to game the rules to the rules themselves. Redrawing maps to divvy up Republican voters as usefully as possible to swing five of 435 total seats relies on there being 435 legislators representing distinct areas. Neither of those things has to be the case, though they are and have been for some time.

For about a century, in fact, a period during which the population of the United States more than tripled. At the risk of being painfully on-brand, the number of representatives hasn’t been increased since before the massive, post-war boom in babies that reshaped the country.

What that means is that the country’s representatives are much less able to represent their constituencies than they used to be.

Consider the president. In 1920, about 26.8 million people cast ballots for the chief executive — about a third of the votes cast last year for Donald Trump alone. Last year, there were 15.8 million votes cast just in California.

The winner that year would represent about 105 million people. Trump currently represents about 342 million.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how bad we are at comprehending such large numbers. But let’s set that aside for now and just consider the extent to which we are effectively represented by the legislators elected to represent us federally.

In the Senate, for example, the average number of people represented by each senator went from about 204,000 in 1820 to 1.1 million in 1920 to 3.3 million in 2020.

In the House, the average number of U.S. residents rose from 45,000 in 1820 to 243,000 in 1920 to 762,000 in 2020.

You’ll notice that we’re using slightly different metrics for evaluating the House and the Senate. You’ll see why in a moment.

The distribution of seats in the House is adjusted after (nearly) every census (and, Texas Republicans hope, occasionally at the mid-point between censuses, too). The population is divvied up and seats assigned by state, with the effect that, even though each seat is meant to represent a consistent number of people, there is instead a range — currently a fairly wide range — between the two.

On average, though, the math works out. Dividing up the population by the number of seats generally yields a figure close to the average number of people represented in each House seat.

You’ll notice that on the graph above I indicated the point at which the number of House seats was frozen. If the number of seats had continued to grow at the rate seen prior to 1930, the chart above might look like the one below.

Anyway, that didn’t happen. And, compared to the other side of the Capitol, the allocation of power in the House is relatively fair.

There, too, there’s a range between the senators with the largest and smallest constituencies. It’s a much larger range, though — so large that it can be hard to distinguish from the original chart of Senate representation.

As you are no doubt aware, there is a massive gap between the number of people represented by senators from Wyoming (the least populous state) and California (the most populous). For what it’s worth, the ratio between the largest and smallest states used to be worse. In 1900, for example, New York had 172 times as many residents as Nevada (7.3 million vs. 43,000). The ratio of people represented by each state’s two senators was just as large.

But the difference in actual residents was fall smaller than the current gap. That was a gap of about 7 million, compared to the 39-million-resident gap that current exists between the most- and least-populous states.

The average Californian has to compete against 19.8 million other residents (in theory) in order to be heard. The average New Yorker in 1900 had to compete against only (“only”) 3.6 million.

The lopsidedness of the Senate can be viewed another way. In 1900, the population of New York was larger than that of the 17 least populous states — meaning that New Yorkers had two senators for the 34 senators representing those 17 smaller states.

Now, California’s population is larger than the 21 smallest states, meaning that there are 42 senators representing a population that’s smaller than the population represented by California’s two senators.

California is more populous than these 21 states, to be specific.

We don’t here need to go into the debate over whether the allocation of power in the Senate is justified or necessary. What we can do, though, is note that that allocation is much more unequal than it used to be.

At the same time, we can acknowledge that the representative democracy created under the Constitution is far less representative of individual Americans than it was or than it could be. Even before Texas games the system.

Photo: The Senate Armed Services Committee in 1949. There’s a future president in the mix. (National Archives)

The day Donald Trump announced his 2016 presidential candidacy at Trump Tower, I was tasked with evaluating the factual claims he made in his speech. I did so … for the first couple of inaccurate claims he presented. Then I cut to the chase.

”This is the whole thing about fact-checking Donald Trump: He is un-fact-checkable,” I wrote. “That’s his gift and his angle.”

At the time, this was an observation offered about a man that everyone knew was not a serious contender for the presidency. That he invented numbers and embraced numbers invented by others was of no more consequence, it seemed, than the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist outside the White House are consequential to the decisions in the Oval Office.

Then voters invited the guy with the conspiracy theories to make the Oval Office his workplace. Twice.

The first time they did so, Trump spent four years trying to fend off reality. He’d built a robust base of support by telling Americans what he thought they wanted to hear, and some did. Fact-checkers scrambled to point out that a lot of what he offered was contrived or imaginary, but he simply declared that the fact-checkers were the dishonest ones. For people invested in agreeing with Trump, it was easier to believe that someone they’d never heard of was a liar than was the president who’s promised them the world. Or, if not the world, then at least making their enemies suffer worse than they were.

When he came back to the White House in January, the situation was different. The artificial universe he’d helped construct wasn’t a political aberration; it had devoured nearly the entire political right. What little opposition he’d faced from his own party in 2017 was gone, just as he felt sufficiently confident and resentful to wield the power of the presidency however he saw fit. Who was going to stop him, Mike Johnson? Samuel Alito? Be real.

On Monday, Trump deployed this new approach on two subtly connected fronts. He announced that his administration would take over law enforcement in D.C., ostensibly because it was demanded by a level of crime that constituted an emergency. He also nominated a Heritage Foundation apparatchik to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, having fired the sitting director ostensibly because she’d overseen the release of biased or unfair jobs numbers.

As you are likely aware, neither of those pretexts is legitimate. Crime is down in D.C., not up. The jobs data produced by the BLS is reliable — in part because it includes revisions that are a form of self-correction. So while it is true that there is crime in D.C. and it is true that the jobs numbers aren’t perfect, Trump took extraordinary (and alarming) actions after exaggerating and misrepresenting both of those issues.

What’s important here is that the numbers don’t matter. It didn’t matter that crime was down in D.C.; Trump and his team simply cherry-picked metrics and amplified skepticism to provide cover for what Trump had wanted to do since 2020. It didn’t matter that the BLS is reliable; the numbers weren’t good so, with his base trained to treat bad news as fake news, change was needed. And reality got blurry.

What’s different about this moment relative to his false claims in 2015 or 2017 is that Trump is empowered and willing to deploy the federal government against objectivity. His intelligence apparatus is spreading false claims about the origins of the Russia investigation. His Health secretary is explicitly rejecting scientific expertise in favor of doing one’s own (non-scientific) research. And, if his nominee is confirmed, the BLS measures of the economy will be withheld or dubious. His economic team has already spent months making false claims about trade, tariffs and international deals. Why not make the jobs numbers say what Trump wants, too?

After Trump’s announcement about D.C., a lot of people noted the conflict between his pro-cop, anti-crime rhetoric and his coddling of the rioters who assaulted police on Jan. 6, 2021. That riot, though, was the culmination of another effort by Trump to supplant reality with cherry-picked, contrived data: his insistence that the 2020 election had been stolen. The post-2020 period, more than his first term itself, established Trump’s second-term modus operandi. Evidence that he was wrong was ignored and countervailing evidence, however dubious, was offered in its stead. And it worked; as late as last year most Republicans thought the election was somehow stolen.

It has long been the case — since his first day as a candidate, if not before — that challenging Trump with facts is fruitless. It’s still important to point out that crime is down and the jobs data is valid, even if we know that the people who will accept Trump’s assertions about those issues won’t accept our own. What’s different now is the extent to which Trump uses data as a tool against reality, forming arguments that get propped up with numbers his side invented or isolated and in service of which contradictory figures are sent to rhetorical purgatory.

And that he has now enlisted the federal government in this effort.

Photo: Official White House photo by Abe McNatt. (Flickr)

Let us consider the ongoing overhaul of the White House as a metaphor.

A few months ago, back when I was at The Washington Post, I compiled a series of photos to show how the Oval Office had been slowly redecorated to better reflect the aesthetic of the then-slightly-newer president. Even by then, the once-spare room had begun to gleam with gilded bric-a-brac and a number of random golden objects.

The result was striking.

Oh, that’s not the Oval Office. It is, instead, one of the rooms in a palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Relative to the Oval Office under prior presidents, the room above is over-the-top. Relative to the Oval Office today, the Saudi palace is downright understated.

Feel free to read my commentary on the changes between the pictures below — or just scroll through to get the effect.

The fireplace

Let’s begin by considering the fireplace that sits at the other end of the office from the president’s desk. This is what that fireplace looked like in October of last year, when Joe Biden was president.

Soon after Trump took office, the area had already gotten an overhaul. The greenery on the mantel was replaced with a variety of golden knick-knacks. The paintings on the wall were moved around and new paintings and mirrors — all with gilded frames — added. A bust of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was replaced by one of Winston Churchill, placed on a table shaped like a golden eagle, and a number of flags were added.

You can see the changes a bit more easily below. Notice that the mirror on the door at left is too tall and juts up above the door itself.

Notice, too, the addition of some sort of gold object on the table at the center of the room. It has Trump’s name on it.

By March, an ornate … something was added to the marble just above the fireplace itself.

It was soon joined by other little appliqués on the wall.

Here you can get the full effect. Notice that the too-big mirror on the door at left was replaced. Trump also brought back the model of Air Force One that sat on the center table for much of his first term in office.

Between June and early July, additional appliqués were added to the sides of the fireplace and to the space under the central portrait. This required swapping out the largest center trophy-thing with a less-gold clock. The bust of Martin Luther King Jr. was replaced with one depicting someone that looks like Dwight Eisenhower.

Notice, too, that the marble on the fireplace itself was gilded. You can see that better below.

Recently, the clock was swapped back out for the golden trophy-thing. Gold statue-things were also added next to each of the busts.

The slow accretion of gaudiness is obvious when we switch back to the first time Trump entered the White House after his first term ended: when Biden hosted him after Trump won the 2024 election.

The overhaul that followed was dramatic.

The rest of the room

That has also been the case in the rest of the room.

When Biden was president, the area around his desk mirrored the area around the fireplace: lightly decorated and (relatively) austere.

Then came Trump. More paintings, more flags.

Golden objects and flourishes were added elsewhere, too, as above the doorway below. Shelves on the opposite wall became home to other little golden objects, in the same manner as the mantel over the fireplace.

Trump had a copy of the Declaration of Independence added to the room, which Tim Tebow looked at for a while when he visited.

Notice, in the picture above, that the border ringing the room is unadorned except for some scalloping. A week or so later, it was home to gilded appliqués like those that would eventually adorn the fireplace.

If you’re curious when all of this work was done, you will not be surprised to learn that Trump spent the weekend between April 1 and April 10 at Mar-a-Lago.

Here’s Dr. Oz admiring the resulting aesthetic.

The accents went further. More gold things on the shelves. The border of the door is now gilded. Golden appliqués were added to the wainscoting.

By late May, all of the relief elements of the doorway had been gilded, including the fasces above the lintel.

Apparently concerned that the room wasn’t gaudy enough, more appliqués were added, including to the wall next to the bookshelf and to the sections of the door. The architectural elements in the border at the top of the room was also gilded.

Again, compare this with the way the office looked in the last days of Biden’s presidency.

An unrelenting and unsubtle overhaul.

Outside the residence

Trump’s made other changes, too. The Rose Garden went from looking like this…

…to looking like this. White-and-yellow striped umbrellas were added to the tables below, echoing the aesthetic on Mar-a-Lago’s patio.

Trump also had a gigantic flagpole installed on the south side of the White House — another update that mirrors a change he’d made at one of his private clubs.

Again, this can all be understood as a metaphor. Trump is reshaping the White House to mirror his own predispositions and tastes, regardless of history and regardless of cost. He is in the process of doing precisely the same thing to the rest of the country as well.

All photos are from the White House on Flickr.